Manet’s Flying Raven (1875)

Manet's ex-libris (left) for Stéphane Mallarmé's translation of Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Raven seems remarkably simple - and natural.1 Yet this bird is highly artificial, constructed from elements that have more to do with art than flight. Let's look at the most difficult first.

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Captions for image(s) above:

Manet, Ex-libris for "The Raven" (1875) Lithograph on paper. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Notice how the upper contour of the wings differ (top), one ragged, the other smoother. The former, if given a quarter-turn (bottom left), seems to use a very common method to depict - most approximately - the artist in profile. The intentional lack of definition suggests that any one form in Manet's mind, especially his own identity, might melt into another with the bird's wings, of course, as the flight of his own imagination merged with the poet Poe's.2 Edgar Poe had had huge influence on Manet's late friend Charles Baudelaire as he clearly later had on Mallarmé too. Indeed Manet and Mallarmé used to study Poe's writings together and Poe at the time was said to be more widely admired in France than in his native America.3 That Manet should have depicted Poe as alive in his own mind is not at all surprising.

Supporting this reading are the unrecognized forms of the raven's claws and beak. The avian "hands", combining craft and imagination into one symbol, form the letters E and M inverted for Edouard Manet. The lower branch of the E is bent downwards to help better resemble real claws while disguising the underlying initials. Right next to them is the bird's beak which, in isolation, resembles the metal nib of a pen, split realistically down the middle into its two tines. It's as though the bird is in the process of drawing his own claws and thereby "signing" his sketch with Manet's initials, the painter painting himself.4

4. For a detailed account of Poe's influence on Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Manet, see Melissa de Medeiros, "A New Order of Beauty - Manet, Mallarmé and Poe" in A Painter's Poet: Stéphane Mallarmé and his Impressionist Circle (New York: Hunter College) 1999, pp. 61-7